We can only be in awe of young women such as Nika Shakarami

Like Mahsa Amini, Nika Shakarami never made it home alive, writes Borzou Daragahi

A demonstration in solidarity with the Iranian people near the European parliament in Strasbourg (EPA)

Not much is publicly known about Nika Shakarami. A video posted on social media shows her dressed in goth-like black, bashfully singing a song for friends.

With family ties to Iran’s southwestern city of Khorramabad, she was just shy of 17 years old when she took part in a 20 September protest in Tehran sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, the young woman who was killed after being arrested by the morality police. Shakarami went missing. Her family looked for her for days, searching for clues at police stations and hospitals. They posted messages on social media.

But like Amini, Shakarami never made it home alive. Regime officials delivered her badly damaged body, with stitches and signs of physical assault, on 29 September. Authorities provided no explanation and not a single measure of accountability for the death of the young woman.

Adding flagrant insult to injury, regime officials grabbed her body from the mortuary and buried her against the family’s wishes in a village, in an apparent attempt to avoid a politically charged funeral march. The family and her supporters tried to hold one anyway, and were met with regime gunmen firing birdshot.

Regime gremlins abducted Shakarami’s relatives as apparent hostages and warned others not to speak out. But relatives did, tipping off international media. Shakarami’s grieving mother can be seen on 3 October in viral media, defiantly speaking out for her dead daughter.

“Today was your birthday, my dear!” she says through unimaginable pain, her headscarf off. “Today I say congratulations on your martyrdom!”

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei said on Monday that he was pained by the 16 September death of Amini and reiterated the regime’s promises of a thorough accounting. Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, has even suggested that the morality police who arrested her and held her in custody could be reformed.

But neither black-turbaned cleric has addressed the root of the problem: that Iran is a nation run by sick, sadistic and damaged ghouls who use Islam to justify their every horrific crime, including beating a teenage girl to death and then snatching her body from her distraught parents in the dark.

Even as it claims to protect the honour of women, the Islamic Republic is murderously misogynistic at its core, and we can only be in awe of people such as Nika Shakarami and the thousands of young women risking their lives to stand up to its vile enforcers.

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent